Monday, March 30, 2015

Greece's creditors seem to be successful in pushing the government of Alexis Tsipras to yet go ahead with further privatising its largest port, Piraeus, while two months ago it still had announced it would maintain state control of Piraeus Port. The Greek government
is expected to sell its majority stake of 67 percent to the Chinese company Cosco which already owns two container terminals of the partly privatised
port. This is what Greek deputy prime minister Yannis Dragasakis told China's
official
Xinhua news agency on March 28, 2015. (The picture above is from Der Spiegel of 28 March and the caption says: Port of Piraeus: U-turn in privatisation project.)

According to Wall Street Journal of 29 March, Greece expects to raise at least 500 million euros from the sale of Piraeus Port. Greek officials also told creditors they will seek to
privatise operating concessions at 14 regional
airports, said Wall Street Journal.

Greece's creditors - European countries, ECB and IMF - are putting pressure on the Tsipras government to stick to 'reforms' agreed by the previous Greek governments with the Troika.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, has insisted his
government will not carry out any recessionary measures to cut
wages, jobs or pensions. But it seems that Greece's creditors insist Tsipras should stick as well to 'reforms' earlier agreed with respect to labour and pensions.

In reading this and other news about Greece it was ironic that another article I read this morning, about damage caused in Greece by Nazi Germany during the second world war, carried a picture of Piraeus as illustration. Below I copy that picture and the first part of the article, titled "Greece: debt and memory of war", written by Conn
Hallinan.

Greece: debt and memory of war

Memory is selective and therein lies an explanation
for some of the deep animosity between Berlin and Athens in the
current
debt crisis that has shaken the European Union (EU) to its
foundations.

For German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble,
"memory" goes back to 2007 when Greece was caught up in the
worldwide financial conflagration touched off by American and
European speculators. Berlin was a major donor in the 240
billion euro "bailout" - 89 percent of which went to pay off the
gambling debts of German, French, Dutch and British banks.
Schauble wants that debt repaid.

Millions of Greeks are concerned about unpaid debts
as well, although their
memories stretch back a little further.

In July 1943 Wehrmacht General Hubert Lanz, commander
of the First Mountain Division, was annoyed because two of his
officers had been threatened by civilians in the western Greek
town of Kommeno. It was dangerous to irritate a German commander
during the 1941-45 occupation of Greece.

Lanz first murdered 153 men, women and children -
ages one to 75 - in Mousiotitsas, then surrounded Kommeno, where
his troops systematically killed 317 people, including 172
women. Thirteen were one year old, and 38 people were burned
alive in their houses. After the massacre, the soldiers ate
their lunch in the village square, surrounded by the bodies of
the dead, and then pushed on to other villages, killing more
than 200 civilians.

It was not the first, nor the last massacre of
Greeks, and most people in that country can recite them like the
beads on a rosary: Kondomari (60 killed); Kardanos (180 killed);
Alikianos (118 killed); Viannos (over 500 killed); Amari (164
killed); Kalavryta (over 700 killed); Distomo (214 killed). All
in all, the Germans destroyed more than 460 villages, executed
130,000 civilians, and murdered virtually the entire Jewish
population - 60,000 - during the occupation.

On top of that, Athens was forced to "lend" Germany
475 million reichsmarks - estimated
today at 14 billion euros - to pay for the occupation.
Adding interest to the loan makes that figure somewhere around
95 billion euros.

The Greeks "remember" a few other things about those
massacres. Gen. Kurtl Student, the butcher of Kondomari,
Kardanos, and Alikianos, was sentenced to five years after the
war, but got out early on medical grounds. The beast of
Mousiotitsas and Kommeno, Gen. Lanz, was sentenced to 12 years,
served three, and became a major military and security advisor
to the German Free Democratic Party. In 1954 he wrote a book
about his exploits and died in bed in 1982. Gen. Karl von Le
Suire of Kalavryta fame was not so lucky. Captured by the
Soviets, he died in a Stalingrad POW camp in 1954. Lt. Gen.
Friedrich-Wilhelm Muller, who ordered the Viannos massacre, was
tried and executed by the Greeks in 1947.

It is not hard to see why many Greeks see a certain
relationship between what the Germans did to Greece during the
occupation and what is being done to it today. There are no
massacres - although suicide rates are through the ceiling - and
no mass starvation, but 44 percent of the Greek people are now
below the poverty line, the economy is shattered, and Greeks
feel they no longer control their country. Up until the last
election, they didn't. The Troika - the European Central Bank,
the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund -
dictated the price of the loan: layoffs, wage and pension
reductions, and huge cutbacks in health care. True, their
occupiers did not wear the double thunderbolts of the SS or the
field green of the Wehrmacht, but armies in pinstripes and silk
ties can inflict a lot of damage.

Deescalating Europe’s Politics of Resentment

MAR 25, 2015

ATHENS – A German
television presenter recently broadcast an edited video of me, before I
was Greece’s finance minister, giving his country the middle-finger
salute. The fallout has shown the potential impact of an alleged
gesture, especially in troubled times. Indeed, the kerfuffle sparked by
the broadcast would not have happened before the 2008 financial crisis,
which exposed the flaws in Europe’s monetary union and turned proud
countries against one another.

When, in early 2010,
Greece’s government could no longer service its debts to French, German,
and Greek banks, I campaigned against its quest for an enormous new loan from Europe’s taxpayers to pay off those debts. I gave three reasons.

First, the new loans
did not represent a bailout for Greece so much as a cynical transfer of
private losses from the banks’ books onto the shoulders of Greece’s most
vulnerable citizens. How many of Europe’s taxpayers, who have footed
the bill for these loans, know that more than 90% of the €240 billion
($260 billion) that Greece borrowed went to financial institutions, not to the Greek state or its people?

Second, it was
obvious that if Greece already could not repay its existing loans, the
austerity conditions on which the “bailouts” were premised would crush
Greek nominal incomes, making the national debt even less sustainable.
When Greeks could no longer make payments on their mountainous debts,
German and other European taxpayers would have to step in again.
(Wealthy Greeks, of course, had already shifted their deposits to
financial centers like Frankfurt and London.)

Finally, misleading
peoples and parliaments by presenting a bank bailout as an act of
“solidarity,” while failing to help ordinary Greeks – indeed, setting
them up to place an even heavier burden on Germans – was destined to
undermine cohesion within the eurozone. Germans turned against Greeks;
Greeks turned against Germans; and, as more countries have faced fiscal
hardship, Europe has turned against itself.

The
fact is that Greece had no right to borrow from German – or any other
European – taxpayers at a time when its public debt was unsustainable.
Before Greece took any loans, it should have initiated debt
restructuring and undergone a partial default on debt owed to its
private-sector creditors. But this “radical” argument was largely
ignored at the time.

Similarly, European
citizens should have demanded that their governments refuse even to
consider transferring private losses to them. But they failed to do so,
and the transfer was effected soon after.

The result was the
largest taxpayer-backed loan in history, provided on the condition that
Greece pursue such strict austerity that its citizens have lost
one-quarter of their incomes, making it impossible to repay private or
public debts. The ensuing – and ongoing – humanitarian crisis has been
tragic.

Five years after the
first bailout was issued, Greece remains in crisis. Animosity among
Europeans is at an all-time high, with Greeks and Germans, in
particular, having descended to the point of moral grandstanding, mutual
finger-pointing, and open antagonism.

This toxic blame game
benefits only Europe’s enemies. It has to stop. Only then can Greece –
with the support of its European partners, who share an interest in its
economic recovery – focus on implementing effective reforms and
growth-enhancing policies. This is essential to placing Greece, finally,
in a position to repay its debts and fulfill its obligations to its
citizens.

In practical terms, the February 20 Eurogroup agreement,
which provided a four-month extension for loan repayments, offers an
important opportunity for progress. As Greece’s leaders urged at an
informal meeting in Brussels last week, it should be implemented
immediately.

In the longer term,
European leaders must work together to redesign the monetary union so
that it supports shared prosperity, rather than fueling mutual
resentment. This is a daunting task. But, with a strong sense of
purpose, a united approach, and perhaps a positive gesture or two, it
can be accomplished.

Of Greeks and Germans: Re-imagining our
shared future

Any sensible person can see how
a certain video[1] has become part of something
beyond a gesture. It has sparked off a kerfuffle reflecting
the manner in which the 2008 banking crisis began to
undermine Europe’s badly designed monetary union, turning
proud nations against each other.
When, in early 2010, the Greek state lost its capacity to
service its debts to French, German and Greek banks, I
campaigned against the Greek government’s quest for an
enormous new loan from Europe’s taxpayers. Why?
I opposed the 2010 and 2012 ‘bailout’ loans from German and
other European taxpayers because:

the new loans represented not a bailout for Greece but a
cynical transfer of losses from the books of the private
banks to the weak shoulders of the weakest of Greek
citizens. (How many of Europe’s taxpayers, who footed these
loans, know that more than 90% of the €240 billion borrowed
by Greece went to financial institutions, not to the Greek
state or its citizens?)

it was obvious that, at a time Greece could not repay its
existing loans, the austerity conditions for giving Greece
the new loans would crush Greek nominal incomes, making our
debt even less sustainable

the ‘bailout’ burden would, sooner or later, weigh down
German and other European taxpayers once the weaker Greeks
buckled under their mountainous debts (as moneyed Greeks had
already shifted their deposits to Frankfurt, London etc.)

misleading peoples and Parliaments by presenting a bank
bailout as an act of ‘solidarity to Greece’ would turn
Germans against Greeks, Greeks against Germans and,
eventually, Europe against itself.

In 2010 Greece owed not one euro to German taxpayers. We had
no right to borrow from them, or from other European
taxpayers, while our public debt was unsustainable. Period!
That was my ‘controversial’ point in 2010: In 2010, Greece
should have borrowed not one euro before entering into debt
restructuring procedures and partially defaulting to its
private sector creditors.
Well before the May 2010 ‘bailout’, I urged European citizens
to tell their governments not to even think of transferring
private losses to them.
To no avail, of course. That transfer was effected soon after[2] with the largest taxpayer-backed
loan in economic history given to the Greek state on austerity
conditions that have caused Greeks to lose a quarter of their
income, making it impossible to repay private and public
debts, and causing a hideous humanitarian crisis.
That was then, in 2010. What should we do now, in 2015, that
Greece remains in crisis and our people, the Greeks and the
Germans, have, regrettably but also predictably, descended
into a mutual ‘blame game’?
First, we should work towards ending the toxic ‘blame game’
and the moralising finger-pointing which benefit only the
enemies of Europe.
Secondly, we need to focus on our joint interest: On how to
grow and to reform Greece rapidly, so that the Greek state can
best repay debts it should never have taken on while looking
after its citizens as a modern European state ought to do.
In practical terms, the 20th February Eurogroup
agreement offers an excellent opportunity to move forward. Let
us implement it immediately, as our leaders have urged in
yesterday’s informal Brussels meeting.
Looking ahead, and beyond current tensions, our joint task is
to re-design Europe so that Germans and Greeks, along with all
Europeans, can re-imagine our monetary union as a realm of
shared prosperity.
—————————–[1] Whose showing derailed an otherwise
constructive discussion on German television.[2] First in May 2010 (€110 billion) and
then again in the Spring of 2012 (another €130 billion).

Thursday, March 19, 2015

It makes me angry that they are cornering the new Greek government. It
may be that it was not tactical and not according the agreement with
its creditors (the Troika of the European Commission, the European
Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) that the Greek government presented yesterday in the Greek parliament a bill to help the poorest Greeks, and it may be that, according to the rules (who set the
rules?), it should have consulted the Troika before adopting this bill, because of their budgetary costs, but I perfectly understand why the Greek government has not done that.

The Greeks are tired of being humiliated and not being allowed to fulfill the electoral promise of helping the poorest. But
the technocrats of the Troika, who were accustomed to
commanding and being obeyed, are upset that the new Greek government does not
behave like previous governments. And the technocrats know they have a lot of power.Do they want the attempt of the new Greek government to conduct non-neoliberal politics becomes a failure? Do they want to warn the new Spanish party Podemos and those who intend to vote for it, that a government of Podemos would be a failure?It may be that the new Greek government has committed diplomatic and
tactical mistakes, but my esteem for it is much larger than for the Troika.Prime
Minister Alexis Tsipras said in Parliament, where he presented the bill to
help the poorest, that it was the first bill in five years that was adopted in
Athens rather than ordered by technocrats of the European Union. He
criticized a senior EU official who had written a letter to the Greek government saying that it should not adopt the law before consulting its international
creditors. The EU official said that the bill should be discussed first to see if it were in accordance with the agreed reforms. "Doing otherwise would be proceeding unilaterally".

According to a BBC article Tsipras told the Greek parliament: "If they're doing it to frighten us, the answer is: we will not be
frightened. What else can one say to those who have the audacity to say
that dealing with a humanitarian crisis is a 'unilateral action'?"

Prominent German politicians side with Greece on war reparations

BRUSSELS, 18 March 2015
Greece's increasingly frequent calls that Germany needs to pay it
compensation for crimes committed by the Nazis in WWII have been
supported by prominent politicians in Berlin.
Two leading Social Democrats - part of Chancellor Angela Merkel's
coalition government - on Tuesday (17 March) called on Berlin to start
talks on the reparations issue with Greece.
In an op-ed for Spiegel Online, Gesine Schwan, a former presidential
candidate, said Germany "needs to clean before its own door" when it
comes to its Nazi past, noting that victims and descendants have longer
memories than perpetrators and descendents.
"It looks awkward when well-off Germany demands the repayment of
debts from poor Greece but is itself not prepared to even speak about
the repayment of a forced loan by Nazi Germany on Greece," she wrote.
SPD’s Deputy President Ralf Stegner made similar comments by saying
“we should hold a discussion about reparations" but urged that the
matter not be linked to the current euro crisis. "There are still
international legal questions to be resolved," he added.
Green politician Anton Hofreiter said Greece's demands cannot simply
be "swept from the table" and that "morally and legally" the question
remained open.
The statements put Chancellor Merkel in a tough position. Until now
she has argued that the question of reparations is legally and political
closed.
Berlin's position was helped by Greece's overt linking of its current
cashflow problems with Germany's "moral" duty to pay billions of euros
in reparations.

But now that centre-left politicians have broken ranks, the issue becomes harder to ignore.
Greece is seeking compensation on three accounts - general war
reparations, a claim resulting from a massacre of 214 people in the
Greek village of Distomo in 1944 and the repayment of the forced loan
that the Nazis got from the Greek central bank in 1943. The total
amounts to hundreds of billions of euros.
Germany, for its part, says it has honoured its obligations, having
paid Greece 115m Deutchmarks in 1960. It also argues that the matter was
closed by the 1990 'two plus four treaty' signed by West and East
Germany, as well as the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the US.
But this has been disputed in a 2013 report by the German
parliament's research service which argued that these agreements do not
necessarily fully close the matter.
Spiegel Online reports that Merkel is keeping a hard course on Greece because she fears similar demands from other countries.
The reparations question has become a flashpoint in the increasingly
bitter relations between Berlin and Athens over what reforms Greece
needs to undertake to secure the next tranche of bailout money.
The far-left Syriza Party under PM Alexis Tsipras was elected in
January on a promise of ending austerity and debt restructuring - but
has run up against opposition from its euro zone partners.
Tsipras is due to meet Merkel in Berlin on Monday (23 March) - a
meeting that comes after German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said
that trust in Greece had been "destroyed" by the behaviour of the Greek
government.
However the Tsipras government is not the first Greek administration
to bring up the reparations issue. It was also raised by Antonis
Samaras, Tsipras' centre-right predecessor, as well as in the 1990s.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Amid all the heated news coming from Germany today about Yanis Varoufakis raising his middle finger against Germany, more than two years ago at a conference in Zagreb where he promoted his book "The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the
Future of the Global Economy" (see what he said, in this video), the announcement I just read of Angela Merkel inviting Alexis Tsipras for a visit to Berlin, is a welcome counterweight, especially because of the nice photograph that illustrates the article in Deutsche Welle, "Tsipras kommt nach Berlin".

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Charles Wyplosz (see, for example, Wyplosz' excellent article "Messing up the next Greek debt relief could endanger the Eurozone"),
Paul de Grauwe and Yanis Varoufakis are among the well known,
thoughtful economists who have criticized the way European policymakers
and the IMF have handled Greece's debt problems (and that of other
European countries). One of their criticisms is that Greece's debt
should have been reduced in 2010 rather than increased, as was done when
the first EU-IMF 'rescue' loan package for Greece was put in place.
Rather than helping the Greek people, these new loans helped European
private banks to survive.

Paulo Nogueira Batista, executive director of the IMF

Their criticism was shared by Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista, executive director of the IMF, who said in a prepared statement
to the May 9, 2010 IMF board meeting discussing an IMF loan to Greece:
"The risks of the [Greek] program are immense…As it stands, the program
risks substituting private for official financing. In other and
starker words, it may be seen not as a rescue of Greece, which
will have to undergo a wrenching adjustment, but as a bailout of
Greece’s private debt holders, mainly European financial
institutions."

Recently, in a television interview by Thanos Dimadis for Alpha TV, published on March 4, 2015, Paulo Nogueira Batistsa added:

"I was critical of the way the Greek issue was handled by
the Troika including the IMF. One of the major problems of the IMF program was
that they put too much of a burden on Greece and not enough of a burden on
Greece’s creditors. The first program of 2010 was presented as a bailout for
Greece, but in reality was more a bailout of the private creditors of Greece.
Greece received enormous amounts of money but the money was basically used to
allow the exit of, for example, French and German banks, without any
contribution to the restructuring of the Greek economy. (...)

In my opinion, the debt is way too large and a solution to
the Greek crisis should include a restructuring of the debt of Greece with its
official creditors. If you look at the situation in Greece, it’s difficult to
see how Greece will extricate itself from this serious economic and social
crisis without some debt restructuring. The largest part of Greece’s debt is
now with its European partners. (...)

The Troika or the institutions as they are now called,
should respect the sovereignty of the Greek nation. The IMF and the European
partners cannot behave as though the elections did not happen. It would be wrong
to say that Greece should stick to all the commitments made by the previous
government. This has to be
reviewed. The IMF should consider the fact that the targets for the fiscal
adjustment and the targets for the primary surplus need to be revised downward
and substantially."

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Charles Wyplosz (see, for example, Wyplosz' excellent article "Messing up the next Greek debt relief could endanger the Eurozone"), Paul de Grauwe and Yanis Varoufakis are among the well known, thoughtful economists who have criticized the way European policymakers and the IMF have handled Greece's debt problems (and that of other European countries). One of their criticisms is that Greece's debt should have been reduced in 2010 rather than increased, as was done when the first EU-IMF 'rescue' loan package for Greece was put in place. Rather than helping the Greek people, these new loans helped European private banks to survive.

Paulo Nogueira Batista, executice director of the IMF

Their criticism was shared by Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista, executive director of the IMF, who said in a prepared statement to the May 9, 2010 IMF board meeting discussing an IMF loan to Greece: "The risks of the [Greek] program are immense…As it stands, the program
risks substituting private for official financing. In other and
starker words, it may be seen not as a rescue of Greece, which
will have to undergo a wrenching adjustment, but as a bailout of
Greece’s private debt holders, mainly European financial
institutions."

Recently, in a television interview by Thanos Dimadis for Alpha TV, published on March 4, 2015, Paulo Nogueira Batistsa added:

"I was critical of the way the Greek issue was handled by
the Troika including the IMF. One of the major problems of the IMF program was
that they put too much of a burden on Greece and not enough of a burden on
Greece’s creditors. The first program of 2010 was presented as a bailout for
Greece, but in reality was more a bailout of the private creditors of Greece.
Greece received enormous amounts of money but the money was basically used to
allow the exit of, for example, French and German banks, without any
contribution to the restructuring of the Greek economy.

In my opinion, the debt is way too large and a solution to
the Greek crisis should include a restructuring of the debt of Greece with its
official creditors. If you look at the situation in Greece, it’s difficult to
see how Greece will extricate itself from this serious economic and social
crisis without some debt restructuring. The largest part of Greece’s debt is
now with its European partners.

The Troika or the institutions as they are now called,
should respect the sovereignty of the Greek nation. The IMF and the European
partners cannot behave as though the elections did not happen. It would be wrong
to say that Greece should stick to all the commitments made by the previous
government. This has to be
reviewed. The IMF should consider the fact that the targets for the fiscal
adjustment and the targets for the primary surplus need to be revised downward
and substantially."

The history of public debt in Greece and Spain

The Greek debt saga still goes on. Recently, Spanish economist Vicenç Navarrro put it in a broad historical perspective, in an article published by Counterpunch on January 9-11, 2015 ("What is going on in Spain?"). Navarro is a professor of political sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University in
Spain and a professor of public policy at the Johns Hopkins University
in the USA, who has become well known in Spain being one of the authors of a best-selling book presenting an alternative to the current neoliberal economic policies. He has also gained prominence being one of the two authors of a wide-ranging plan recently adopted by the new political party Podemos to change course in Spain: Un Proyecto Económico para la Gente (An Economic Project for the People).

Navarro has written extensively (see, for instance, “Capital-Labor: The Unspoken Causes of the
Crises,” www.vnavarro.org,
Economic Section and "Crisis and Class Struggle in the Eurozone") about the historical reasons why Spain,
Portugal, Greece and Ireland are in trouble. In the January 2015 Counterpunch article he summarised his view as follows:

"All these countries,
referred to rather unkindly in the Anglo-Saxon economic literature as
PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain), have had ultra-right-wing
dictatorships (fascist or fascistoid), except Ireland, governed by a
very conservative party close to the Church. These dictatorships were
the result of military coups (in the case of Spain, supported by Hitler
and Mussolini in 1936) against democratically elected governments that
had initiated meaningful reforms affecting the privilege of the
oligarchy, i.e., the agricultural, financial, and (in the case of
Catalonia and Basque Country in Spain) industrial bourgeoisie, in
addition to the Catholic Church and the Army. The Spanish fascist coup
established one of the most brutal repressions that has ever taken place
in Western Europe during the 20th century. (...) Franco’s dictatorship was a class dictatorship against the
working population. That dictatorship was responsible for the enormous
economic and cultural underdevelopment in Spain. When the military coup
took place in 1936, Spain’s Gross National Product (GNP) per capita was
similar to Italy’s. In 1978, when the dictatorship ended and the
democracy was established, Spain’s GNP per capita was only 62% of
Italy’s. That was the economic cost of having a fascist dictatorship."

According to Navarro one of the reasons Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland have huge public debts is that the income of their states is much less than that of other Eurozone countries. This, again, has its historical roots, as Navarro explained in a recent interview with him held by students of the Pompeu Fabra University:

It is positive that we have thoughtful economists. But it would be even better if some of their good ideas are put into practice. In Greece the new government is trying to do that. Hopefully, the Greeks will receive support in the near future from a new government that Spain may get when Podemos wins the elections. According to polls the chances are high that Podemos would win if
elections were held today.

Navarro ended his January 2015 Counterpunch article looking at the future. He said:

"The success of Podemos has become a major threat to the
Spanish (and to the European) establishment. Today, the Spanish
financial, economic, political, and media establishments are on the
defensive and in panic, having passed laws that strengthen the
repression. The heads of the major banks in Spain are particularly
uneasy. Mr. Botín, president of the major bank Santander, indicated four
days before he died (a few weeks ago) that he was extremely worried,
indicating that Podemos and Catalonia were very threatening to Spain.
He, of course, meant his Spain. And he was right. The future is quite
open. As Gramsci once indicated, it is the end of a period without a
clear view of what the next one will be. Europe, Spain, and Catalonia
are ending an era. This is clear. What still is unclear is what will
come next. We will see."

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org